Good. We need more activist teachers willing to teach the realities of race and racism. It would help if the teacher unions got more militant too.
This isn't activism. It's honesty.
You're correct that it's honesty. Honesty becomes activism when the truth is banned.
Last spring, two students in that year’s English class had complained to the school board, alleging that “Between the World and Me,” which contends racism is embedded in American society, made them ashamed to be White.
What a pair of awful little shits.
I bet their parents were 10 times worse.
They, frankly, should be ashamed. Although, ashamed in general.
Good for her.
I love what she's doing. That said-
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
I doubt they're unfamiliar with racism, what with being raised by white conservative southerners. They probably heard the N-word a thousand times before they could say it themselves.
Of course, they're very unfamiliar with being at the receiving end of racism, something that Ta-Nehisi Coates can teach them a lot about.
I doubt they’re unfamiliar with racism, what with being raised by white conservative southerners. They probably heard the N-word a thousand times before they could say it themselves.
Hi, white southerner here. FYI, that's really not how it works. Regardless of whatever behavior they've grown up with, they most likely don't think it's "racist;" they think it's "normal." Hell, they might even "have a black friend" who is "one of the good ones" and are perfectly polite to any well-dressed, middle-class, Carlton-from-Fresh-Prince-of-Bel-Air-esque black person they occasionally interact with. It's just all those other "criminal" "hoodlums" from the "inner city" that they have a problem with, and they'll swear up and down that the reason is anything but race (absolutely refusing to understand the concept of institutional racism, or indeed, cause-and-effect in general).
Looks like she thinks the kids might lack exposure because they're rich:
Both teachers knew that most teens in Chapin — a wealthy town where the median income is above $100,000 and large homes line pretty Lake Murray — had never read anything like Coates’s searing account of growing up Black in Baltimore. They had not spent their childhood, as Coates wrote he did, “naked … before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.” They had never memorized “a list of prohibited blocks,” unsafe due to guns and violence.
Hey! She's trying to edumacate us!
If anyone needs to be taught what it's like to be black in America, it's white people in America.
This book is so good, if you have not read it please do. The audiobook is narrated by the author.
-- Gen x northern European dude
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